I wrote this to Po Bronson, acclaimed self-help author of the recent best-seller book, "What Should I Do With My Life?"

I watched the innovation of internet suck the ink -- including my name --right off the pages of the very magazines that I wrote for while working at The Discovery Channel. As managing editor for a travel magazine, one by one I witnessed wall tacks fall to the ground from a world map - each a plotted destination (to be my stories) - and then stick themselves to the souls of my shoes. When the last of the tacks(Anchorage, Alaska) had inadvertently bonded itself to me, we left together, out the door of the penniless venture. As assistant producer for a NY City independent film, I coordinating actors before a truck accident on the set crushed both my arm and my dignity and sent me back home to Maryland. Together, a non-smoking friend and I auditioned for a Winston cigarette billboard commercial and as my friend quickly learned the meaning of the term “multiple takes”, well, I think you get the picture. I climbed countless stairwells and drove endless miles in foreign towns as a telecom/long distance salesman. The only personal gain I experienced was from my own physical vigor while forced to continually walk backwards down those very same stairwells faced with the enraged and inundated business owners. As a studio set assistant (really a prop gopher) during a restaurant commercial in Manhattan, I took so many taxi trips to restaurants across the city in search of the “the perfect produce” that many cab drivers knew me by name. I carried luggage at a hotel/resort and one day found myself dropping bags off to a recently married bride – my ex-girlfriend! -- and I never looked back. I flourished while selling computers/software during the “.com” era and then lost the money investing it right back into the very same IT stock market. And, for weeks in San Diego as a crisis employment manager for a U.S. student foreign exchange organization, I was “strongly” advised to dodge the Lithuanian, Russian and Bulgarian press only to witness their weary children jobless and donating blood simply to eat. All of this, I tell you, is just a taste of my recent experiences after graduating from college and attempting to figure out “What Should I Do With My Life?”